The present invention relates to data storage systems, and more particularly, data storage systems that implement sector sets.
A storage device writes data to and reads data from blocks (sectors) on a storage medium. Writes to a sector are irreversible in that the storage system cannot revert the content of a sector to a previous state. Once data is written to a sector, the old data is overwritten and lost.
In normal system operation, write operations are intended to permanently overwrite old data. However, some specialized applications, such as virtualized system files and log structured files systems, could greatly benefit if the storage device would automatically retain the old data as well. Therefore, it would be desirable to provide techniques for retaining old versions of data stored in data storage devices.